


and now my heart is green as weeds

by eudaimon



Series: Fingerbones - Jamie Kirk [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:04:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's nothing like a love story.  They do keep ending up together, though.</p><p>(Takes place in a verse where Kirk was born a girl).</p>
            </blockquote>





	and now my heart is green as weeds

It's nothing like a love story. He's been around long enough ( _old enough and ugly enough_ is what his mother used to say) to know that, with people like them, people like him and Jamie, things never last.

People like them, who were born with wandering hearts under dipping stars. 

In Mojave, on her birthday, he took her camping and fucked her slowly in the firelight. On her birthday, she's always softer, somehow, brittle, so he took pains to be gentle, and she came at least twice, he thinks, though its always hard to tell when she cries. After she fell asleep with her head on his chest, he tousled the fingers of one hand through her hair, cradled her close and held her for a time.

It isn't love, which doesn't mean that he doesn't deeply _care_.

Sometimes, Jamie Kirk is difficult to be around. Four hours after she failed the Kobayashi Maru for the first time, he found her sitting on his doorstep, so drunk she couldn't see straight, her eye swelling up, ugly. He'd iced it for her first, probing with gentle fingers, and then he'd pressed his lips to puffy flesh, and they hadn't fucked, but she'd stayed. His bed is wide, the room up in the roof and he'd lay there watching her in the moonlight and he tried to work out how to tell her that _just because her father crashed and burned doesn't mean that she has to, too_.

Sometimes, when they fuck, she's rough and wrong, pushing and shoving, all but climbing him, leaving deep red scratches on his back and his shoulders under his uniform shirt. He bites her lip. She pulls his hair. When they're in Iowa, when he's there to see his ship being built, she goes to see her mother and he won't come, spends all day at the shipyard and she comes back to the hotel in the evening strange and quiet and, when he's taking a bath, enjoying the heat seeping into his muscles, she comes and climbs into the water with him and sinks down onto him with a leg folded on either side of his thighs.

They're not equals, but they pretend to be in places like Iowa. This isn't love, but maybe that doesn't matter.

He knows where to find her when he needs to.

It's a shit-hole, so it makes sense that she loves it there. Once, he walked in just as some huge cadet was picking himself up off the floor and Jamie was leaning in to graze her lips against the lips of Nyota Uhura. To this day, Pike's not sure what happened there, but he knows that money changed hands. He never found out what the bet was, and whether Jamie won or lost. 

Tonight, he walks in just as she's turning her head and spitting blood onto the dirty floor, her weight dancing from one foot to the other. She flexes her shoulders, her hands still up and she stretches her neck from one side to the other. She sees him, he knows that she does because she brushes her thumb across her hurting mouth and then she looks right at him and she smiles.

What he knows is this: she wins as much as she loses, and he doesn't know many people tougher, Starfleet or not. She rolls with punches and he loses count of how many times she hauls herself to her feet, shaking her head to clear it. There's blood on her wifebeater and her hair's sweaty and hanging in her eyes, and, eventually, he steps in behind her because nobody else is stupid enough to keep getting up.

 _It's done_ , he says. _Come home_.

His home or hers. It doesn't really matter.

She just needs to keep fighting for a while. And she needs him because she trusts him not to back down until she's done.

And sometimes she just needs to be held until she remembers how to be still.

Tonight, sitting at his kitchen table, she's punch drunk and swaying. Not for the first time, she lets her knees fall apart, spreads her legs so that he can step between them and clean her up. He dabs at her lip with a cotton swab soaked in alcohol and, to her credit, she barely even winces. He cleans her up and her hands slide up, push under his shirt and sit against his waist.

"You didn't break anything?" She's already got too lumpy finger-joints, courtesy of a fight when she was fifteen and some hick doctor who didn't set her bones straight. Pike's heard McCoy's opinions on that at length, but Pike isn't sure he doesn't like it. It stops her from being too perfect to be believed. It's one of the ways that he knows her in the dark.

"I didn't break anything," she says and her tongue darts out to touch the place on her bottom lip that's tender and torn.

"You want water?"

A smile touches the corner of her hurting mouth and her hand slips lower, cupping his ass through his jeans and squeezing, when his hips cant forward her lips almost brush against his fly. He changes the angle of her head with fingers under her chin.

"I don't want water. I want you to fuck me on the table. I just...Chris, I need you to be with me for a minute."

He was in love once, married a girl with the desert in her bones and wandering in her jade green eyes, and been married to her, loved her and she'd left him when Starfleet gave him own ship, and she got sick of sharing him. This, this with Jamie right here, it doesn't feel anything like that warm and distant time which doesn't mean that its not good, and, perhaps, that's all that counts?

It doesn't have to last.

He bends and kisses her, firm but sweet, and then he moves away from her, ignoring for the moment the shine of her lips and the fact that he's already half hard. At the sink, he lets the faucet run until the water's properly cold. He fills a tall glass and brings it back to her, holds it until she takes it.

"Drink it anyway," he says.

She drinks the whole thing down, so her mouth is cool and sweet when he kisses her again. Her t-shirt comes up over her head easily and his follows. She's wearing a push up bra edged with hot pink lace and he dips into it with both hands, lifting both of her tits free as he presses her back onto the table, one limb at a time. Her jeans come off easily and, of course, she's not wearing panties. Of _course_ she's not and of course there's a condom in her back pocket. Some days, he feels like there isn't a conscious choice that's hiss to make in the whole world. Not where Jamie T. Kirk is concerned.

It's like stars shifting into place. Like meteors.

He has this tendency to slip into poetic metaphors when he's getting ready to press inside her, her thighs spread around him, her hands on his shoulder and the back of his head, urging him on as he lifts her, her ankles crossed at the small of his back, her hair tumbled and golden on the scarred wood of his kitchen table, and the way her lips part and she smiles when he presses inside her.

_I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway_

When he was a boy, his mother taught him to hunt with a bow, and that's what Jamie most reminds him of now, taunt like part of a weapon. Which makes sense, when he thinks about it. She was born of parents who knew how to fight, a mother who came through fire and smoke with a newborn in her arms...a father who saved eight-hundred lives in order to protect just two.

Chris Pike has always thought that there’s no such thing as a truly selfless act of heroism. Which doesn’t make them any less given from God.

He presses into her at a different angle while bending his head to kiss her and she gasps into his mouth and he remembers the first time that he saw her and he remembers seeing her tonight, the way she squared her shoulders and stretched her neck, her hands always up, her feet dancing. And it's not a love story, and it's never going to be anything like a love story, but, just then, it's him and her and his kitchen table, and the sun’s gone down enough that it's almost dark in the kitchen, but Jamie casts a little light all of her own making. Two years after they met and she's exactly as brilliant as he knew she would be on that night when he first saw her lying on her back across that table, bloody at the mouth and with her own star-like start reflected in her eyes. Fucking beautiful, yes, but that wasn't nearly all. Looking at her file, he'd expected her to be spectacular, and, in that at least, she's never let him down. And as for the rest? 

You can't expect a meteor to predict the trajectory of its sky-skimming. You just make plans to be the man who’s waiting when it comes crashing back to earth.


End file.
